Hi! I'm Harrison Goohs and I've been drawing maps for over a decade.
I first began to doodle maps in class in high school, but in 2014 I painted my first endonym map of Europe while living in Belgium. I always found it odd how English place names could differ so much from native names, so I chose to make a map that addressed that very problem. I continued my hobby through my study at Georgetown University and through my Fulbright research in Austria.
To me, cartography combines art, language, and history in a beautiful way. One of the personal projects that I started back in 2015 was to create a history book made of maps. The first 20 or so pages are maps of the contemporary world (political, religious, population density, language, etc.). The rest of the book is to be a collection of more than 180 historical maps and explanations in chronological order. It begins with the Akkadian Empire and traces the development and decline of every major polity up through the present. I have a long way to go.
When I earned my master's degree in European History at Oxford, I wanted to go on to become a history professor. But the path to tenure is no longer a realistic option in contemporary academia, so I instead determined to turn my hobby into a business. Researching a moment in time in sufficient depth to be able to make a map about it allows me to continue learning about history while also practicing art. I want to use the beauty of cartography to shed light on an often obscure past.